Elena Rostova jammed her combat boot against the floor latch of Clara Vance’s mobile ICU isolette.
The heavy medical cart jolted as Coach #404 hit a frost-heaved seam in the asphalt, but the four Q’Straint floor clamps held tight.
Elena’s eyes flicked to Clara’s telemetry screen first. Oxygen saturation held at ninety-eight percent. Brainwave activity traced a steady 9.5 Hz alpha wave across the green display. Her patient was stable, even if the forty-foot transit bus around them wasn’t.
“Don’t turn your neck, Julian,” Elena said, her voice flat and steady. “Keep your chin pointed at the windshield.”
“My chin is forward,” Julian Vance replied from his post behind the two-inch Yellow Standee Line. His voice carried the calm deadpan of a graveyard clerk who had watched every kind of shoplifter walk through Starlight Mart’s doors. “What are we looking at, Nurse Rostova?”
Elena reached into the thigh pocket of her dark scrubs. Her fingers closed around the knurled handle of her four-inch stainless-steel dental triage mirror.
She hated unverified variables. In an emergency trauma bay, mysteries killed patients before the blood work ever came back from the lab. You found the bleed, clamped the vessel, and wrote the exact minute on the chart in permanent ink.
